ABSTRACT
Creative ideas can appear online with amazing speed, and these often relate to innovative products and services. Bearing in mind the ease with which these digital creations can be made part of an existing firm’s operations, it can benefit companies to be open to (or even actively seek out) these innovations. Ideas may be related to revenue-generation projects, or expense-reduction solutions. In light of the relative ease with which something new can often be grafted onto a business’s existing platform or practices, we refer to these opportunities as tangencies. That is, the new feature is not treated as something that will materially transform a company’s core operations (at least not initially), but rather is complementary with existing operations, and it can potentially assist with profitability or efficiency or even both. Further, tangencies are characterized by their neither requiring significant capital outlays nor the implementation of appreciably greater resources.
